Fake News: Staffer fired after TV station airs altered Trump video

A staffer at local FOX affiliate Q13 has been fired after the station aired what appears to be a doctored video of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night speech from the Oval Office.

The video was changed to make it look as if Trump was sticking his tongue out languidly between sentences. In addition, the colors in the video look more saturated, leading the president’s skin and hair to appear more orange.

During the speech, Trump said, “Hopefully, we can rise above partisan politics in order to support national security,” before briefly licking his lips and continuing to speak.

In the video broadcast on Q13, it appears that Trump lets his tongue hang out, resting it on his lower lip for an unusually long time.

“This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the president in a negative light,” Q13 news director Erica Hill wrote in an emailed statement early Thursday.

Later Thursday morning, Hill released another statement saying, “We’ve completed our investigation into this incident and determined that the actions were the result of an individual editor whose employment has been terminated.”

It is unclear whether the employee created the doctored video or just allowed it to go on air.

A side-by-side comparison posted on MyNorthwest.com shows the difference what aired live on CNN and the clip shown later on Q13.

Altering and manipulating images has become all the more easy and tempting in today’s world of fractured politics and accessible technology. And this isn’t the first time a doctored video has made headlines.

CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s access to the White House was temporarily suspended in November when Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Acosta put “his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Sanders tweeted a video snippet that appeared to show Acosta chopping the intern’s arm with his hand as she tried to take the microphone from him. But analysis by fact checkers and researchers noted that the version Sanders tweeted had been altered to distort and exaggerate Acosta’s movements.

Last year, a video of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez ripping a copy of the U.S. Constitution whipped conservatives into a froth. Gonzalez never did such a thing; the original picture was of her ripping a paper gun target. The video had been doctored and spread via social media.

In 2010, the Economist got into trouble for altering a photo to remove people standing on a beach with former President Barack Obama. Obama and two other people were at a Louisiana beach, with oil platforms in the distance. A photo editor at the magazine cropped out one person and digitally removed the other, creating the illusion of Obama standing alone at water’s edge contemplating the damage.

More common these days, however, are images altered by social-media users and circulated to stoke political ire, as the Gonzalez video did; to spread misinformation or disinformation; to target and harass particular people. For example, a recent Washington Post story explained how realistic-looking pornographic videos are being digitally generated to humiliate women. A fake sex tape, with “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot’s face swapped onto someone else’s body, circulated in 2017.

These forgeries, known as “deepfakes,” can be hard to spot. BuzzFeed and Quartz have published guides to help you sort fact from fiction.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering said in 2017 that they had developed algorithms that allow a user to turn audio clips into “lip-synced video.”

The UW’s technology is different from the tools that would have been used to doctor the Trump video that aired on Q13. But the announcement raised immediate concerns about the potential for malicious uses. One of the UW researchers defended the invention in a TED talk last year.

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(c)2019 The Seattle Times

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32 Comments

I guess the basic gist is we cannot trust any news so all news is suspect. I quit watching news right after Christmas because it was causing me pretty bad depression. I get my headlines thru email. I can read the articles as I choose and Big Brother is not staring at me thru the tv screen ramming content down my throat.

Had the Nazi’s had this technology they would have succeeded in taking over the planet. People don’t know how much pressure and how close Churchill came after Dunkirk to negotiate a peace with Hitler. Now like then, a man of strong will who knows American right from wrong is hopefully in the Executive office and will not be deceived and have the guts to take the heat which when the truth comes out always melts the perpetrators, just like it melted Hitler.

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marines

1:41 pm January 11, 2019 at 1:41 pm

Guy and gals and little pals, and things that go bump in the night. Time to stop using the German Nationalists to commit a single word assassination. They are not Conservatives, they are not Democrats, they may be Socialist Progressives to a small degree, but it is time that such analogies are VERBOTEN! It is glaring ignorance to continue to call each other this. Without a doubt near the end of time Satan will do everything he can to turn us against each other and Christ by appearing to be someone they are not.

You are right, TRUST IS PARAMOUNT, but trust your EYES and EARS first, the liberals don’t want people to be informed, they want uninformed people to vote in 2020, turning off the news is GOOD NEWS to them. They are using hypotheticals to counter their hypocrisy, they attack informed people using bombastic verbiage, especially when it involve DIVERSITY. We cannot even oppose a viewpoint or policy change without a CARD being thrown, sometimes violently, to TRUMP (pun intended) opinions. And when it comes to cards the Democratic party is experts to the sleight of hand maneuvers.

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ltuser

4:12 pm January 11, 2019 at 4:12 pm

I wonder. HAd this not been at a “FOX NEWS AFFILIATE” would he have been fired still???

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DrGadget

7:51 am January 12, 2019 at 7:51 am

“This does not meet our editorial standards…”

Hold on just one second.

Their EDITORIAL standards? Why do you feel the need to edit Trump’s speech at all? This little slip is disturbing. The Media is already cackling about editing out any “propaganda” Trump might speak. Who gave them the right to do this? And who is editing out the propaganda they speak on a daily and even secondly basis?

Sounds to me like they wanted to edit the broadcast already, but the guy doing it was too clumsy. He didn’t it edit it up to their high standards of quality propaganda Fake News.

I saw this happen on Q13 and was livid! I also blame the anchor who was reporting the story.. Bill Wixey. He is a liberal hack. He had to see the video and didn’t say a word. Normally he never misses an opportunity to voice an opinion as if he is a commentator rather than an anchor. I am sick of media bias.. which by the way is dangerous for our country and Democracy. We might as well live in a banana republic.

Well, LorLnow, if we DON’T live in a banana republic, it certain isn’t because that nasty little sociopath and banana republic dictator WANNABE Barrack Obama did not spend 8 YEARS trying to “fundamentally transform” us INTO one! And the conniving CONMMUCRATS are continuing his efforts, working day and night to reduce us to Third World status by trying to do to US with Central American and Mexican ILLEGALS what the globalists have ALREADY done to Europe with HORDES of invading Muslims, in their efforts to rob us of our national sovereignty, erase our borders, and HERD us into the NWO Globalist Collective of their power-mad dreams.

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ltuser

4:14 pm January 11, 2019 at 4:14 pm

And liberals wonder, why i would BE MORE THAN OK, with the current “PRESS” losing their 1st amendment protections.
BECAUSE THEY ARE NO longer the free-press, but the PROPAGANDA wing of the commucrats.

If they fired all the hacks at CNN who did this kind of stuff there wouldn’t be enough people left to run the network. Too bad its gotten to the point where we not only have to be skeptical of what we hear, but also of what we see. There is no honor in the news media these days.

Well they told another Whopper in that story…I was watching Acosta verbally accosting the President in that press gaggle and I most certainly saw Acosta physically bring his arm & hand down onto hers, stop her from moving as she tried to take the mike, and get the mike back. It was physical. At what point is there actually going to be facts ever told again with these con artists playing “journalists”? I knew they were con artists as a kid, when even in a story about my brother soloing in a Cessna 152 very young the Atlanta Journal “reporter” could not get the facts straight.

The Left Can’t help it!!
The Acosta video was claimed, by the press, to have been altered but then again side by side, frame by frame, analysis showed that it had NOT been altered as the TIMES article claims. It had merely been slowed to show the DOCUMENTED contact more clearly.
MORE FAKE NEWS supported by leftist “fact checkers and researchers”.

Remember, the above article was reprinted from the Seattle Times. That’s about as far Left as you can get! So obviously they used the same (disproven) story about how Sanders tweeted a “doctored” video – it fits their narrative!

I think it is important enough that there probably needs to be laws regarding the manufacture and use of edited (meaning altered) media.
While it may be “art” to place one person’s face on a porn star, the distribution of that CAN and SHOULD be illegal UNLESS the “art” is clearly marked as a rendered art, not actual footage and the ARTIST’s NAME is thereon!
This needs to be MORE than a civil issue as suing someone for financial recompense is absurd, the attorneys and court take all the money even if the victim wins. I say if any gain of any kind was derived by any person or if such was used in commercial application (even by a news media as that IS commercial application or they would not exist) then there must be a huge minimum recovery allowed as well as a felony charge for actual harm to the person and or to society. Society IS a victim when someone creates lies and attempts to make them truths.

Try OAN or sometimes OANN, the One America News Network. Fox seems to compelled to always be “balanced”, which turns out that every host has at least one Democrat idiot sitting there who spits out the expected propaganda.
OAN doesn’t do that, and only reports accurately and truthfully.
Not all TV providers will carry OAN, I know AT&T/Directv carry them

With all the Trump haters out there anytime you hear or see something shockingly negative towards the president or his family, in all probability it’s fake. Liberals are desperately trying to bring this president down by any means possible before the 2020 election. Their greatest fear is that he might get re-elected.

This is just MORE proof of just how DESPERATE the conniving Commucrats are, and how LOW they are willing to go, in their frenzied efforts to rid themselves of this troublesome President who drags their corrupt doings out into the light of day and puts America and Americans FIRST, which is the LAST thing these globalist VERMIN want!

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